“I’ll get you boys some water,” Loreda said, easing the slimy bit out of Milo’s mouth. She turned him into his stall, the back of which opened out to the corral.
As she closed the stall door, clicked it shut, she heard something.
What?
She left the barn, stepped outside, and looked around.
There it was again. A deep rumbling. Not thunder. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky.
The ground trembled beneath her feet, made a loud, crunching, splintering sound.
A crack opened up in the earth, a giant snaking zigzag.
Boom.
Dust geysered into the air, dirt crashed into the new crevasse, the sides crumbled away. A part of the barbed-wire fence fell into the opening. New cracks crawled off from the main one, like branches on a tree limb.
A fifty-foot zigzagging crevasse opened in the yard. Dead roots stuck out from the crumbling dirt sides like skeletal hands.
Loreda stared at it in horror. She had heard stories of this, the land breaking open from dryness, but she’d thought it was a myth …
Now, it wasn’t just the animals and the people who were drying up. The land itself was dying.
* * *
LOREDA AND HER DADDY were in their favorite place, sitting side by side on the platform beneath the giant blades of the windmill. As the sky turned red in the last few moments before darkfall, she could see to the very end of the world she knew and imagine what lay beyond.
“I want to see the ocean,” Loreda said. It was a game they played, imagining other lives they would someday live. She couldn’t remember now when they’d begun; she just knew that it felt more important these days because of the new sadness in her father. At least it felt new. She sometimes wondered if his sadness had always been there and she’d just finally grown up enough to see it.
“You will, Lolo.”
Usually he said, We will.
He slumped forward, rested his forearms on his thighs. Thick black hair fell in unruly waves over his broad forehead; it was cut close to the sides of his head but Mom didn’t have time to tend it closely and the edges were ragged.
“You want to see the Brooklyn Bridge, remember?” Loreda said. It scared her to think of her father’s unhappiness. She hardly got to spend any time with him lately and she loved him more than anything in the world, he who made her feel like a special girl with a big future. He’d taught her to dream. He was the opposite of her dour, workhorse mom, who just plodded forward, doing chores, never having any fun. They even looked alike, she and her daddy. Everyone said so. The same thick black hair and fine-boned faces, the same full lips. The only thing Loreda had inherited from her mother was her blue eyes, but even with her mother’s eyes, Loreda saw things the way her daddy did.
“Sure, Lolo. How could I forget? You and I will see the world someday. We will stand at the top of the Empire State Building or attend a movie premiere on Hollywood Boulevard. Hell, we might even—”
“Rafe!”
Mom stood at the base of the windmill, looking up. In her brown kerchief and flour-sack dress and sagging stockings, she looked practically as old as Grandma. As always, she stood ramrod stiff. She had perfected an unyielding, unforgiving stance: shoulders back, spine straight, chin up. Wisps of corn-silk-fine pale blond hair crept out from beneath her kerchief.
“Hey, Elsa. You found us.” Daddy flashed Loreda a conspiratorial smile.
“Your father wants help watering while it’s cool,” Mom said. “And I know a girl who has chores to finish.”
Daddy bumped his shoulder against Loreda’s and then climbed down the windmill. The boards creaked and swayed at his steps. He jumped down the last few feet, faced Mom.
Loreda crawled down behind him, but she wasn’t fast enough. When she got down, her father was already headed toward the barn.
“How come you can’t let anyone have any fun?” she said to her mother.
“I want yo
u and your father to have fun, Loreda, but I’ve had a long day and I need your help putting the laundry away.”
“You’re so mean,” Loreda said.